


someone's calling, i don't mind

by shirohyasha



Category: Uta no Prince-sama
Genre: Gen, M/M, Tokiya is an art history professor, masato is an 1890s painter, mentioned time travel, somewhere in time au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 04:53:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21470362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shirohyasha/pseuds/shirohyasha
Summary: Japan was entering a new and westernised era,Tokiya writes.Doubtless, they would have been shunned for such affections. But these paintings leave no room for doubt – Hijirikawa Masato’s muse was in fact in a relationship with another unnamed woman. There is very little doubt also,and here Tokiya has to pause because this is him he’s writing about, his own face and scar and the tiny mole he has on his stomach, the one that Hijirikawa Masato sketched his own hand framing once.There is very little doubt also that Hijirikawa Masato himself was in a relationship with a man, previously only referred to as his roommate.
Relationships: Hijirikawa Masato/Ichinose Tokiya
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	someone's calling, i don't mind

**Author's Note:**

> i'd like to thank [this thread](https://twitter.com/weisizhui/status/1109500375235649536) for allowing me to finally crystalise my thoughts on this au, which was extremely vague prior to that, and was only based on the line "even if we came down born in different times" from original resonance. which tbqh i might be mistranslating but it haunted me anyway

“What’s your chosen area of study,” the professor asks, and Tokiya smiles at him, blandly.

“The effect of the end of the closed country on art, and how traditional techniques struggled to hold on in a world that was so rapidly changing,” he parrots. He loves it, truly, but art history is not a subject revered by many and this professor does not look friendly.

He does lean in and narrow his eyes, though, which is more interest than Tokiya usually gets. “Which medium?” he asks.

“Painting,” Tokiya says. He expects _you mean woodblock,_ but no such comment comes.

“My own thesis was on the effect of the closed country’s ending on the entertainment industry, particularly music,” the professor says eventually. “I can give you some of my sources, if you like.”

“That,” Tokiya says, extremely pleasantly surprised, “would be amazing.”

The professor’s name is Mikaze Ai and he is an _asshole_.

Nothing Tokiya writes is good enough. Every analysis he makes is met with the red-ink equivalent of a blank stare, every time he tries to make a comment in class the professor disagrees with him so concisely and articulately that Tokiya shrinks in his seat. Tokiya doesn’t feel singled out though, quite the opposite. The whole class band together in their embarrassment.

‘I wish he was wrong,’ someone sends their group chat. ‘If he was wrong we could hate him.’

The problem is, Professor Mikaze is never wrong, and he knows it. He’s never malicious. He’s just really, really tactless.

However, he does have some absurdly good sources for Tokiya’s thesis, so Tokiya steels himself for an individual conversation with the man at least twice a week.

Then Mikaze hands him a book with a painting in it that he recognises, and his whole world turns upside-down for a moment.

When Tokiya had been five, his parents – loving, distant, long gone – had taken him to an art gallery. Tokiya had been a well-behaved child, and so he had held his mother’s hand and followed them around the gallery, looking at the paintings in their gilded frames.

He hadn’t been all that interested but he’d followed along quietly until they reached a small room filled with paintings from nearly a hundred and thirty years ago. Tokiya had tried to work out how long ago that was, and failed, and then he had wandered over to a large flip-book sitting on a table just low enough for him to see the top of. The book had been open on a painting of a woman, one with red hair and gold eyes.

Her colouring had been so unusual that Tokiya had thought he was looking at more of the im-pre-shun-ists who painted with absurd colours and strange shapes. But then he’d flipped a page to see a sketch of a street, motion and life captured so effortlessly with so few strokes.

Tokiya had flipped through the entire book in a few moments, and then read the card beside it. He couldn’t read the name but he could read some of the writing underneath. _A painter _he recognises. _Family_ he reads, and _alone_.

“What are you looking at, Tokiya,” his mother asks from behind him, and he shows her. She smiles at him, uninterested.

“Very good,” she says. “His work is very pretty. Shall we go and get lunch now?”

“Yes, mother,” Tokiya says. “Is the work over there by him too?”

His mother glances around and sees where Tokiya is looking. “I think so, dear,” she says. “Ah, yes. It says it’s one of the only ones he ever completed.”

Tokiya looks at the piece. It’s of a woman, hair so black it shines blue, eyes bright and warm even in her stern face.

“She looks nice,” he says eventually.

“Yes, dear,” his mother says, and Tokiya doesn’t see the painting for a while.

Mikaze glances over to him when he sees it in the book.

“Tokiya?” he asks. “You’ve been staring at that page for three minutes. Is something wrong?”

“No!” Tokiya says, in a rush. “No, I just – I saw this painting at a gallery a long time ago. I didn’t expect to see it here.”

He shows Mikaze the book, and Mikaze nods, thoughtful. “Hijirikawa Masato. A fascinating story, for the four people who have heard of him.”

“Four?” Tokiya asks. “Why so few?”

Mikaze blinks at him. “It was a joke.”

“Oh,” says Tokiya, embarrassed. “Wait. What’s the story? Who’s the girl?”

He glances down at the name on the page, and the kanji used to write Hijirikawa look familiar, somehow. He’s probably imagining it.

“She’s widely believed to be Hijirikawa Mai, Hijirikawa’s younger sister. It’s thought that she was the only family member he didn’t fall out with.” Mikaze takes a breath. “Hijirikawa Masato was born to one of the richest families in Japan, but he died penniless. The Hijirikawa family are still wealthy. I believe they’re in stocks now.”

“I’ve never heard of them,” says Tokiya, which is totally unsurprising. “What happened to him?”

Mikaze smiles humourlessly. “His father was one of the first merchants to be open to trade with the West, and he had plans for his son. Hijirikawa wanted nothing to do with them. He ran away from home, got struck off the family registry, and died very poor. But the work he did was remarkable. His use of colour is unmatched among his contemporaries.”

“The red-haired girl,” Tokiya says distantly. “With gold eyes.”

Mikaze actually smiles at that, a small fleeting thing. “His mystery muse,” he says. “He never completed a painting of her, but from what we know he was quite taken with her, at least in the second half of his career.”

Tokiya notes down the name to research later and closes the book. “Thank you for your time, professor,” he says. He has a class to get to. “I’ll see you soon.”

“I’ll see if I can dig anything up on him for you,” Mikaze says. “He’s definitely a good subject for your dissertation.”

“Thank you,” Tokiya says, genuinely touched for a moment. Then Mikaze scowls at him.

“If you ever manage to string together three sentences in a coherent argument, then you can thank me,” he says. “Until then, I’m clearly not doing my job well enough to be thanked.”

Tokiya flees the office before he tries to murder the man.

He looks up Hijirikawa Masato in the library later. There is one picture of him believed to be a self-portrait, and none from when he lived with his family.

_Presumably all paintings of Hijirikawa Masato were destroyed by his family,_ the book reads. _The Hijirikawa family have declined to comment, but no such paintings have been offered as evidence otherwise._

Tokiya finds himself sad about that. He flips to the next page to see the self-portrait. Hijirikawa Masato is a good-looking man, in the picture at least. He has choppy dark hair and a small mole under his eye, and his features are fine.

_There are few reports from people who knew Hijirikawa Masato in life, so it is hard to say for certain, but the few eyewitness accounts we have say that the man was even more handsome that his self-portrait would suggest._

Tokiya smiles there.

_Hijirikawa died age forty, cause of death unknown. It is believed that he was living with a man at the time. He died unmarried._

And this is what really piques Tokiya’s interest, because he knows what that’s history-book speak for. He checks the book out, along with four others with mentions of Hijirikawa’s life, and goes home to read them.

Mikaze has found him three old, old articles to read about the man, one dating from the 1920s, and the other two from the 1900s. The more recent one just mentions that there will be a showing of his works at a gallery nearby. Of the others, one is a short biography, and one is a eulogy that simply says that Hijirikawa Masato has been reported dead, and that his roommate is expected to take care of the funeral rites as his family will not claim him.

Tokiya pores over the articles (read in an air-conditioned room with thin gloves to protect the paper) for hours, copies out their every word. He reads and rereads the books, copies out passages from them, copies Hijirikawa Masato’s paintings until he can draw the simpler sketches from memory. His thesis ends up being more about Hijirikawa Masato than about the effect of the country opening on art, but as a specimen, he is perfect. He was born in 1863, and so grew up in a world that was trying to adapt to the sudden and rapid change.

There is very little recorded about the Hijirikawa family other than the official public records – births, deaths, marriages. Masato’s name had been struck from the register but there is no record of him marrying, and why would there be. The man who wrote the first book that mentioned him is dead now, but Tokiya calls his estate and asks for any materials they have on Hijirikawa Masato, and they give them to him.

He has two unpublished essays that Tokiya devours greedily. One is about his quarrel with his family, and one is about his later life. _I would argue that most of his works are missing_, the essay reads. _In his personal writings, he one wrote that his mood had a great effect on how much he worked, and there are multiple accounts that the fourth and final decade of his life was the happiest. Additionally, there are the accounts of merchants in the area that he lived – he frequently purchased paints and canvases from them._

Tokiya wishes desperately that this man were still alive, if only so he could talk to him about Hijirikawa Masato. He died in the 1980s though, and other than the two essays the man had written he has no materials on Hijirikawa Masato that are new to Tokiya. Tokiya thanks the man’s nephew profusely and returns to university.

He writes his thesis. Mikaze never seems satisfied with it but Tokiya publishes it anyway and officially becomes the world’s leading expert on Hijirikawa Masato, even though he feels like he knows nearly nothing about the man. He doesn’t know who the girl is, or who his roommate was, or what he thought about his family disowning him for pursuing art. None of this was ever mentioned in the scraps of his personal writings that could be salvaged.

Tokiya pores over them, obsessively. His handwriting is beautiful, extremely traditional and somewhat difficult to read because of it. He was educated by his family then, before they had fully embraced the West. He reads up on the Hijirikawa family today and the overall impression of them he gets is that they are old-fashioned, despite the modernity of their business.

The university offer him a job and he takes it, does research for the art history department. His speciality is pre-war Japan but the department is small, and he is good at research.

(When he was five, and had just come home from seeing Hijirikawa Mai in all her beauty for the first time, he had wanted to be an artist. His parents had… discouraged him, but gently. He wonders what they’d think of him now.)

Then the cache is discovered.

It’s a veritable treasure-trove of paintings, sealed away in a vault by someone unnamed in the 1900s. Tokiya is called in because of his knowledge and he’s almost buzzing out of his skin with excitement at the news. New paintings from Hijirikawa Masato! He feels like he’s been waiting his whole career for this.

The paintings have been taken to a museum where they can be unsealed in sterile rooms and Tokiya goes through all the necessary checkpoints to get to them. He gets a couple of surprised looks from some of the staff but he’s not paying attention to that, has his mind on the paintings and the paintings only.

Then the archaeologist who found the paintings sees him, and swears up a storm.

“Uncanny! Uncanny, I say,” he says. He has said it, quite frequently, and Tokiya has no idea what he’s talking about. “Your genes must be remarkable.”

“Sir,” an extremely tired-looking woman says. “Please allow Ichinose to view the paintings. We can’t do anything without his input.”

The man backs off and Tokiya sees the table with the paintings on them for the first time, and then he understands why the man was swearing so much.

“That’s me,” he says, and points at them. “Those are me.”

They are, without question, him. Tokiya recognises the shape of his nose, the line of his jaw. He’s not vain but he’s seen himself in photographs and these are an exact match.

He’s moved forwards before he’s even thought about it, gloved hands hovering over the nearest painting. It’s a sketch, really, blue-purple in his hair and eyes, pink in his lips. The lines are not neat but they are beautiful, far more beautiful than Tokiya is in real life. But it is him. The painting next to the one just showing his face has a small white scar on his neck, the scar Tokiya got when he was nine and fell over during a relay race on sports day.

“How?” Tokiya breathes.

He’s aware of the man talking behind him, rapid and excited. But the words are buzzing background static and Tokiya is entranced. There are pictures of Hijirikawa Masato himself here too, self-portraits of the two of them. Tokiya moves some of the paintings aside delicately and what he sees makes his breath catch. There is a _finished_ picture of the girl with red hair and gold eyes, and she’s not alone in the portrait. She’s embracing another girl, with hair even redder than the first’s and brilliant pink eyes. Every stroke of Hijirikawa’s brush is stunningly beautiful, the dimples of their smiles and the simple pins in their hair and their kimonos, worn and tired but lovingly mended. The girl with golden eyes smiles out of her portrait, and the girl with the red eyes smiles at her.

“His muse,” Tokiya says. “And her friend, and his roommate. It makes sense now.”

Tokiya feels, like a vice around his heart, so very sad that Jinguji had died in 1986 before these painting were discovered. His final essay would have been vindicated, and doubtless he would have been delighted to find this out too.

Tokiya spends months researching the new paintings and sketches. He dates all of them, researches the materials used to make them, tries not to think about the fact that the man smiling out of the pictures is him. All of these paintings are undeniably romantic, from the painting of him, asleep on a futon and dusted with sunlight, to the one of the two girls with their foreheads pressed together.

_Japan was entering a new and westernised era_, Tokiya writes. _Doubtless, they would have been shunned for such affections. But these paintings leave no room for doubt – Hijirikawa Masato’s muse was in fact in a relationship with another unnamed woman. There is very little doubt also,_ and here Tokiya has to pause because this is him he’s writing about, his own face and scar and the tiny mole he has on his stomach, the one that Hijirikawa Masato sketched his own hand framing once. _There is very little doubt also that Hijirikawa Masato himself was in a relationship with a man, previously only referred to as his roommate._

Tokiya can find no name for the roommate-turned-lover, nothing except for a certification that Hijirikawa Masato’s body was buried in a small plot for people whose families wouldn’t accept them, and that a man who gave his name as Hijirikawa paid for the service.

It was likely the roommate. Tokiya tries not to think about it.

He does a good job. The paintings and sketches are to be displayed at a galley, and they have promised not to remove the parts of Tokiya’s writings that talk about the two girls in love, about the undeniably romantic relationship between Hijirikawa Masato and his unnamed roommate.

Tokiya is pretty sure he knows what his name is but he can’t possibly say anything.

He doesn’t say anything until Mikaze kicks open his office door and says, with his ridiculous monotone, “I time travelled once.”

Tokiya spits out his tea. “You did what?” he manages.

“Time travelled,” Ai says. “I wanted to see a play, so I hypnotised myself.”

Tokiya’s brain is spinning, and maybe he has had too much caffeine and not enough sleep, but he’s sure that this would be a weird conversation even if he was rested and sober.

“Please slow down and start from the beginning,” Tokiya says. Mikaze sighs.

“I only just saw the paintings,” he says. “You’re in most of them. I thought it was just genetics and a coincidence but the scar on your neck is too similar. And I have information about time travel that I decided you ought to know.”

Tokiya blinks, frozen. Tokiya… does not have a lot of friends or family. The few friends he does have are largely disinterested in his work. No one apart from the overly enthusiastic man who found the paintings has made the connection, though really someone should have. Mikaze is very observant and he does keep up on his former students’ work, if they’re pertinent to him. Apparently, he’s only just gotten to Tokiya’s essay series from last year.

“There was a performance I was interested in,” Mikaze continues. “All records of the script of the play have been lost, but it was said to bring hardened soldiers to tears, and to cause women to wither and die of sadness.”

Tokiya blinks. “That sounds like a sad play,” he offers lamely. Mikaze rolls his eyes.

“Yes, Tokiya, it was a sad play, but what’s sadder is that it was lost. I read an article about time travel, so I tried it.” He looks a little embarrassed. “It didn’t work very well. I tried to check my phone almost as soon as I arrived.”

“You arrived?” Tokiya yelps. “You mean you went back in time?”

Mikaze nods. “I did. Undoubtedly. For a few moments only.”

“And why did checking your phone send you back?” Tokiya says, and if there weren’t copies of paintings of _him _from the 1890s sitting on his desk, he wouldn’t believe Mikaze at all but there are, and he does.

“It was a form of hypnosis,” Mikaze says. “I dressed in traditional clothes and meditated in a bare room. The theory was that you had to believe you had gone back in time, and so you would.”

Tokiya nods slowly. It sounds ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous, but.

“And you woke up in another time period,” Tokiya says.

“I did,” Mikaze agrees. “I went outside. The whole street had changed, and for a moment I thought I had somehow gotten lost. I went to check the map on my phone, and was violently thrown forwards.” He takes a breath. “It was the single most brilliant experience of my life.”

Tokiya stares at him. Mikaze tells jokes, occasionally, bad ones in a monotone that confuse people. But he always says ‘I’m joking,’ afterwards, and he never looks this flustered about it.

“Do you think I should try it?” he asks, voice barely audible. “I – that’s me. That has to be me.” He gestures at one of the paintings. “Am I supposed to go back in time and fall in love with Hijirikawa Masato? Is that something that’s already happened?”

“I don’t know,” Mikaze says, and collapses into the chair on the other side of Tokiya’s desk. “Can I tell you something?” he asks.

“Of course,” Tokiya says, and Mikaze looks at him.

“I’m sick,” he says. “I have a very complicated mix of conditions, so if I tried to go back in time again, I would die in a week. Additionally, the strain it places on the body could be enough to kill me if I tried to come back.”

He raises his shirt up and Tokiya sees a small box stuck to his skin. “See. This is one of four devices keeping me alive,” Mikaze says. “If I went back in time now, I’d die in a week without it. I have a pacemaker and a mechanical hip that requires tuning each year. I am only alive because of medical advancements, and the risk going back in time poses to be is greater than any possible benefits.”

“Oh,” Tokiya says. He doesn’t really know what to say. “I’m sorry you lost that chance.”

“As am I,” Mikaze says. “I tried just before I got sick. The doctor suggested that a great shock can be one of the triggers for some of these conditions, and when I came back from the past I was unwell for days.”

“You think it’s dangerous for me to try,” Tokiya says. He hadn’t realised he’d been planning at all but of course he’s going to, of course he has to find out.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Mikaze says. “It could be dangerous. There’s not enough data to support any theories either way. What I’m saying is that you should try anyway.” He sighs. “You don’t seem happy here.”

This seems a little surreal. Mikaze Ai, his bastard of a professor, is trying to offer him advice on being happy.

“I enjoy my work,” Tokiya insists, but he hesitates. “There’s just so much I don’t know,” he says. “It’s frustrating.”

“So learn,” Mikaze says. “There’s already evidence that you went back, and that Hijirikawa Masato loved you, and that you most likely loved him too and paid for his funeral. You may as well see.”

Tokiya meets his eyes and nods. “Alright,” he says, determined. “Alright. I’ll try.”

He buys a vintage kimono and learns to style it correctly. He buys old coins from a collector, one who barters harshly. He researches and researches as much as he can, and then three months after he decides he’s going to do this, he takes a sabbatical from his job and rents a house out in the middle of nowhere.

He dresses in his kimono, combs his hair, and lives like that for a week. He cooks over the coals, washes using a basin of water he draws from a well. He forgets his phone, forgets his job, forgets his life. He meditates all day and takes walks in the morning, a route far enough from civilisation that he doesn’t see anything but forest.

On the eighth day of meditation, Tokiya wakes up in 1885.

**Author's Note:**

> title from [heaven](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbmYNpVSbUk) by charly bliss, which is a great song you should totally check out :)
> 
> idk man i really like this au but i dont really know how to continue it. feel free to message me if you have any ideas. or if you dont and just wanna talk about tokimasa hanging out in the late nineteenth century. or utapri in general im easy


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